Cancer is one of the leading causes of death. However, with the early detection and treatment, many cancer patients can live a long productive life. Unfortunately, cancer treatment can be extremely painful or discomforting to cancer patients. Some cancer patients even stop cancer treatment due to extreme pain and/or discomfort during treatment.
Cancer treatment typically involves a relatively indiscriminate killing of both cancerous cells and non-cancerous, e.g., normal, cells. Many side-effects of cancer treatment can be attributed to killing of non-cancerous cells during cancer treatment. It is believed that many, if not all, of the undesirable side-effects of cancer treatment are in large part due to apoptosis of non-cancerous cells due to cancer treatment.
While some cancer treatments have been developed that target mainly the cancerous cells, such treatments are not widely available, are often time consuming, or require additional laboratory work.
Therefore, there is a need for a general method for reducing apoptosis of non-cancerous cells during cancer treatment to reduce the side-effects of cancer treatment due to apoptosis of non-cancerous cells during such a treatment.